theSkyNet POGS is a research project that uses Internet-connected computers to do research in astronomy. We will combine the spectral coverage of GALEX, Pan-STARRS1, and WISE to generate a multi-wavelength UV-optical-NIR galaxy atlas for the nearby Universe. We will measure physical parameters (such as stellar mass surface density, star formation rate surface density, attenuation, and first-order star formation history) on a resolved pixel-by-pixel basis using spectral energy distribution (SED) fitting techniques in a distributed computing mode. You can participate by downloading and running a free program on your computer.
theSkyNet POGS is based at The International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research.

88 Testers - Awesome
I now have 88 testers - you guys are awesome. I'm really surprised that my t1.micro instance on AWS (the free one) is coping nicely - peak CPU load is only 30%. The BOINC developers have down a fantastic job of minimising the CPU requirements on the servers.

I've closed account creation now - as I only have 6 galaxies prepared and we're already 1/2 way through it in 3 days!!! I'll speak to my colleagues at Johns Hopkins to see if we can get some more as validation does not appear consistent Windows & OS X seem ok, but Linux appears variable.

As a lot of you noticed, there haven't been any workunits for POGS for about a week.

I've been told by Kevin this morning that POGS has finished processing all the galaxies he needs.

Next up, we'll be looking at reviewing all of the processed galaxy data and preparing it for actual use.

Kevin tells me that the next step is to use the processed galaxy data to train an auto-encoder neural network to classify galaxies based on their features. We'll have a gigantic amount of training data ready for this task, so the prospects of positive results seem high.

Additionally, any research papers that ICRAR publishes using this data will contain an acknowledgement to the work done by everyone who contributed to POGS.

The POGS and theSkyNet websites are going to remain up for the time being, but Kevin is also looking to shut them down once everything has fully wrapped up. This is mainly due to monetary issues - it costs more than $2,000 AUD per month to keep the POGS and theSkyNet services running.

So I'm sorry about how abrupt this is, but we're all done. Thank you everyone for your contributions, great or small. Kevin and I do appreciate everything you've done, and we'll be sure to put all the data to good use.
I'm glad to have been able to help manage this project, even if it's only been one day a week for the most part. The community here has always been a good one.

I can try and answer any questions anyone has in this thread - I'm sure there'll be some.

Thanks again for everything,
Sam

_________________Life is Science, and Science rules. To the universe and beyond
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